Staten Island’s rich forgotten history is retold

“Staten Island in the Nineteenth Century: From Boomtown to Forgotten Borough" by Joseph Borelli; The History Press (192 pages, $21.99)

———

Most New Yorkers don’t think much of Staten Island. In fact, they don’t think about it at all.

And when they do, it’s about how different it is. With under half-a-million people, it’s the smallest borough and the whitest. Unlike the rest of the city, Staten Island voted for President Donald Trump twice. And it doesn’t have a subway.

When it became part of New York City in 1898, it encountered issues “that remain intractable to this day,” former Borough President James S. Oddo writes in a foreword to Joseph Borelli’s “Staten Island in the Nineteenth Century: From Boomtown to Forgotten Borough.”

“We share little in common with the rest of what was then known as the City of Greater New York,” Oddo observes. “It is likely that we never will.”

Representing the island’s south shore on the New York City Council, Borelli’s not a disinterested party. And he remains unconvinced this union was or is a good idea.

“There can be no doubt that being a part of New York City has had its benefits,” Borelli writes. “Yet perhaps it is time to ask the question again: What price has been paid for this privilege?”

Borelli’s book begins as the 18th century was closing. With a population of 3,838 in 1790, a growing Staten Island rushed to provide services. A poorhouse was built in 1803 to shelter the impoverished. Public schools were opened, and a courthouse was erected. Twelve dollars were spent on wooden stocks to publicly shame petty criminals.

Many residents prospered. Daniel Tompkins rose to the top, serving as a New York Supreme Court judge, and governor, before becoming James Monroe’s vice-president. A wealthy developer, he loaned the government $1.4 million to help finance the War of 1812. A staunch abolitionist, he railed against “unjust and cruel bondage.” And, as governor, he signed a bill emancipating every enslaved New Yorker.

Other residents chose Staten Island to escape politics. After Aaron Burr fatally wounded Alexander Hamilton in a duel, he was tried, acquitted for treason, and endured a ruinous divorce. Hamilton’s son represented Burr’s ex-wife. The former veep died at the Port Richmond Hotel, shunned, in 1836. “He breathed his last in the presence of, and his eyes were closed by, a passing stranger,” noted a journalist.

General and 11-time President of Mexico Antonio López de Santa Anna also sought refuge in Richmond County. Life had gone disastrously for him after his triumph at the Alamo, and in 1865 the embattled military man fled his country, ending up in Staten Island. Reportedly, he disembarked with barrels of chicle, an extract of the sapodilla tree. He thought it might prove a cheap substitute for rubber.

Attempts to refine the raw material failed, as did the general’s efforts to recruit an army to restore him to power. He slunk home, leaving the chicle behind. However, his business partner, amateur inventor Thomas Adams, took another look at it and decided the stuff might make a new kind of candy.

And so chewing gum was invented in Staten Island – or, so claimed the Chiclets company.

Perhaps the island’s greatest success was Cornelius Vanderbilt. Born in 1794, he dropped out of school at 11 to work his father’s ferryboat. He eventually bought his own small boat, taking passengers to Manhattan for 18-cents. By the end of his first year, Vanderbilt had made $1,000. And by the time he was 23, he had built a steamboat empire.

When he died in 1877, Vanderbilt had not only amassed a Gilded Age fortune of over $100 million but set a record for the single, largest charitable contribution in U.S. history — $1 million, to build the Tennessee university which bears his name.

But there were also troubled times on Staten island, most springing from residents’ resentments.

In 1799, the state legislature used eminent domain to seize 30 acres on the island’s north shore, where it built a quarantine hospital for contagious travelers entering New York harbor. It was, Borelli notes, “only the first time the powerful city government and the legislature would place unwanted, albeit necessary, facilities, in the county.”

Other institutions, including a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients, followed, outraging everyone, reported the “New York Herald,” “from the wealthy gentleman who occupy summer villas on the Island to the humblest oysterman who works for his dollar a day.” Finally, in 1858, a mob of 400 Staten Islanders ordered patients out of their beds and burned the quarantine hospital to the ground.

The state sued Staten Island for damages, but the point had been made. The next medical facilities were established on floating barges and on two artificial islands.

But there was racial unrest on the island, too. True, Staten Island was home to many liberal abolitionists. One of them, Robert Gould Shaw, would go on to lead, and die with, the Union’s famous “Glory” battalion. Yet when the Civil War draft began, a week’s worth of race riots erupted, starting in Manhattan before spreading to Staten Island.

By the time they had been quelled, in July of 1863, a Black neighborhood in Stapleton had been destroyed, and countless residents beaten, shot, or even lynched. As it had with the quarantine riot, the state held Staten Island taxpayers liable for the damages.

Meanwhile, as the century drew to a close, Manhattan power brokers worried. The city’s population stood at 1.5 million, but Chicago had reached 1.1 million, and Philadelphia was close behind. New York City, an 1894 pamphlet argued, needed to permanently cement its status as America’s largest city or relinquish its role as arbiter of “business, music, society, politics, the drama, everything.”

Manhattan had already annexed the Bronx. Brooklyn – which by then had absorbed much of Queens and boasted a population of well over 1 million – was the next obvious prize.

Yet “as afraid as New York may have been of Chicago,” Borelli writes, “industrialists feared that the inefficiencies of the port system … was rendering it less desirable than New Orleans, Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia.” To truly grow, New York City didn’t just need Brooklyn’s population; it needed Staten Island’s coastline.

First, Manhattan’s government had to get the voters of Brooklyn and Staten Island to sign on. It wasn’t easy. Brooklyn, a major city in its own right, was reluctant to relinquish its independence. Staten Islanders were deeply suspicious of Manhattan politicians.

Yet when the referendum was held, it passed. Proponents celebrated, predicting better city services and lower taxes.

Flash forward to 2022.

Despite decades of promises, no rail link to the other boroughs has been built. The island’s Fresh Kills Landfill, the massive dump – opened supposedly on a temporary” basis in 1948 — only closed in 2001 and was redeveloped as a park.

None of these slights have gone unnoticed. In 1993, two-thirds of residents voted to secede, although the referendum was largely symbolic.

Borelli, though, hasn’t given up on the idea.

“It’s time we re-imagine Staten Island as anything but the ‘forgotten borough,’” he writes. “It must reassert itself as one of the largest, safest, and most successful communities in the United States – an honor we held throughout the 19th century, and one we would soon attain through our political independence from City Hall.”